GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 960M, which features a core clock frequency of 1096 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (115%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9800 GTX will be 10% quicker than the GeForce GTX 960M overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M should be a little bit (about 1%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 640 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6736 (62%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.